Former agency boss turned advertising contrarian Bob Hoffman believes the public and marketers need to wake up to the significant privacy concerns and ineffectiveness in digital advertising.

Mr Hoffman believes digital advertising is overhyped and is, to the danger of the industry, dominated by the Silicon Valley duopoly of Facebook and Google.

"Take away Google and Facebook and the online advertising industry is not growing. They have essentially become the online advertising industry," Mr Hoffman told The Australian Financial Review.

"I don't understand why governments aren't taking a close look at the restraint of trade that is happening as a result of the extraordinary amount of power these two have."

According to research by US venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, Google and Facebook account for 85¢ in every new digital advertising dollar spent in the US, a trend that is believed to be similar in markets such as Australia.

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"They continue to be non-transparent in their practices, they will not allow full third-party auditing which has been a standard practice in the agency business for years – clients don't seem to care," Mr Hoffman said.

"It's like they've been mesmerised​. We spent decades developing practices so we can understand the relative media value we're buying through auditing and now these guys won't agree to that."

Google was found to put many of its clients' advertising on content such as extremist recruitment videos, anti-Semitic and anti-feminist content on its video-sharing platform YouTube, which led to a large-scale boycott of the site.

"The thing about the brand safety issues with Facebook and Google, I wrote about that years ago, but as soon as that appeared in newspapers, all of a sudden the advertisers pretended they were shocked, they had no idea ... I don't buy that," Mr Hoffman said.

Mr Hoffman warned the tracking digital advertising is hurting journalism and is concerning from a privacy stand point.

"The whole essence of online tracking is to follow people from quality websites like The Australian Financial Review, follow them to Bikinibabe.com, and it's costing you 1/50 what it cost you on a quality website," he said.

"This is not just hurting journalism, it's hurting society. We have fake news and crappy websites that people are going to all the time and advertisers are sending them money. It's diminishing the ability of quality media organisations to exist and sending money to the crappiest places possible."

However, Mr Hoffman said the issue is not too far gone to rescue.

"People don't understand how their privacy and security is being compromised by all this tracking," he said.

He pointed to legislation in the European Union, which will be enforceable in May 2018, called the General Data Protection Regulation, which provides tougher rules for the use and privacy of EU citizens' data.

"This will effect the ability of advertisers to send their ads to crappy locations instead of reaching people on the websites of quality publishers who are developing an audience. I think this is an important step," Mr Hoffman said.

"This is a serious issue for journalism, for the health of democracy and I think the public, when educated about the problems and the dangers of surveillance marketing, will be in agreement that these are needed things."

Mr Hoffman will be in Australia in September to deliver the keynote speech for ReThinkTV, run by broadcasting industry lobbying and marketing group ThinkTV.